Antichamber

The Steam Holiday Sale continues today with huge savings throughout the store! Check back often to take advantage of our eight-hour Flash Sales. You can even help select what goes on sale with our Community's Choice Voting Sales.

In addition to Flash and Vote sales, more than a hundred games and apps will be featured as Daily Deals throughout the sale, with new deals popping up every 24 hours.

Participating in the 2013 Steam Holiday Sale will also earn customers exclusive Holiday Sale Trading Cards. Collect, trade, and craft 10 Holiday Snow Globe Cards that can only be earned during the sale. Every craft of a Holiday Sale badge will also generate a random item drop from 10 participating Free-To-Play games, featuring exclusive in-game items from Warframe, Path of Exile, Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2 and more. These items are both tradable and marketable.

Antichamber is a mind-bending psychological exploration game where nothing can be taken for granted. Discover an Escher-like world where hallways wrap around upon each other, spaces reconfigure themselves, and accomplishing the impossible may just be the only way forward.

Several years in the making, Antichamber received over 25 awards and honors throughout its development, in major competitions including the Independent Games Festival, the PAX10, IndieCade and Make Something Unreal. Antichamber was also supported by the Indie Fund.

Indie gaming has gotten kind of huge over the past few years, and the internet's beginning to bulge at the seams with all the indieness going on lately. Indie Game: The Movie—whose special edition is being released next week—last year documented the lives of four indie developers as they put together their little-budget, big-name concepts. What of the thousands of other indie developers out there, though? A pair of filmmakers are seeking to answer that question with their newly revealed Kickstarter campaign for GameLoading: Rise of the Indies, a documentary that seeks to zoom out and look at the entire indie scene globally.

Studio Bento's already traveled the world in their quest to quiz ostensibly every indie developer ever, and a heap of interview footage has already been shot of game development greats such as Chris Avellone and Antichamber's Alexander Bruce; the Kickstarter campaign seeks to raise the funds for the team to travel even further, penetrating such mystical places as Romania and Belgium. Lester Francois of Studio Bento says that the film will be of special interest to PC gamers.

"When we started the film, I was surprised at how many indie developers are sticking to making games for PC," Francois tells PC Gamer. "It's great meeting developers not concerned with the iOS gold rush and content doing their own thing. We're very excited to be interviewing some of these PC developers, including the guys behind FTL and Kentucky Route Zero."

Pledging $15 will get you a digital download of the film, and there are also tiers including two indie games bundles. I've seen some of Studio Bento's footage so far, it's already looking really special. I'm especially eager to hear from the guys behind my latest favorite indie game, Kentucky Route Zero—to check out the full list of interviewees, check out GameLoading's website.

Not content with funding only two games through Kickstarter, Double Fine has received some extra dough from the Indie Fund for two more unannounced games that are currently in development.

"I'm really excited and honored to announce on behalf of Indie Fund that... we will be funding an additional two titles from Double Fine," Indie Fund's Kellee Santiago said according to Gamasutra.

The Indie Fund is an organization founded by a handful of indie developers who’re looking to fund various projects that pique their interest. Monaco, Antichamber, and The Swapper are just a few of the games the Indie Fund has invested in so far.

While it’s a little odd to see a developer receive even more money from sources traditionally meant for small indie developers, Double Fine has a proven track record. They’ve made good games, and they haven’t given us a reason to think they won’t continue to do so.

Antichamber is a mind-bending psychological exploration game where nothing can be taken for granted. Discover an Escher-like world where hallways wrap around upon each other, spaces reconfigure themselves, and accomplishing the impossible may just be the only way forward.

Several years in the making, Antichamber received over 25 awards and honors throughout its development, in major competitions including the Independent Games Festival, the PAX10, IndieCade and Make Something Unreal. Antichamber was also supported by the Indie Fund.

- A deeply psychological experience that will make you question everything you know about how a game works.- Mind-bending challenges that will subvert your expectations at every twist and turn.- An enormous, seamless non-Euclidean world to explore.- Lifelike soundscapes developed by Robin Arnott and an ambient soundtrack composed by Siddhartha Barnhoorn.- A gun that can create, destroy and manipulate matter, allowing you to discover new ways to overcome your surroundings.

It bears reminding ourselves that old-school RPGs and adventure games with sky-high budgets aren’t the real reason that crowdsourcing is a tantalising new model for game development. Smaller, madder ideas with eminently achievable funding goals are why Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are a force for good. Soundself ticks all the right boxes – novel but not ridiculous concept, sensible target, playable prototype.

The ‘not a game’ lobby will doubtless be out in force should Robin Arnott’s voice-controlled curio achieve any kind of profile, but the rest of us can enjoy tinkering with the odd, mesmeric sound and vision generated in response to our own voices. It’s almost self-hypnosis. (more…)

Antichamber tied our brains into painful knots back in January, and its clever puzzles both drained our sanity and pulled a positive review out of our confusion. Since then, the indie head-scratcher has pulled some impressive initial sales—Polygon reports that it has sold over 100,000 copies on Steam.

Creator Alexander Bruce says Antichamber's initial success "blew some people's expectations out of the water" as a predictor of total sales, but he kept his hopes reserved because its complexity made it difficult to market, by which he must have meant its tendency to cause players to karate kick the nearest teddy bear in frustration. (What, only me?)

"I've been burned by expectations before," Bruce tells Polygon. "I did that to myself with all of the competitions I was entering in. Several times, I entered competitions, I had all my hopes and dreams pinned on them, I thought it was a sure shot, and then I missed them. And that sucked. And as I went through later competitions, I made sure I didn't do that. I said back in 2010 that sales are just another competition to me. And if I can win all these other ones, I'm testing the waters for how it sells."

Bruce's gamble evidently worked out, and Antichamber is probably the best chance on Steam to make your brain do a somersault within your skull. You can grab it for $20.